Care Homes for Older People

Debate between Jeremy Quin and Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Nicola Blackwood)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) for securing this important debate. He is a doughty campaigner. As he said, it is almost a year to the day since he last raised the issue in the House and he has taken much action since. I pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), for his work. He has laid great foundations for the work we are doing now. As he said, care homes play a vital role in our society, but the decision to move into a care setting or place a family member there can be exceedingly stressful. It is essential that the public have confidence in the quality of care that they seek. Poor care, abuse and neglect are completely unacceptable at all times, whatever the cause, and we are determined to stamp them out.

My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) is right that we must learn from the mistakes of the past. That is why in October 2014 we introduced a tougher CQC inspection regime based on the five important questions that matter most to people: are services safe, caring, effective, well led and responsive to people’s needs? It is why we brought in a new criminal offence of ill treatment and wilful neglect, and why a fit and proper person test has been introduced to ensure that providers do not recruit directors who are known to have been responsible for unacceptable standards of care.

The CQC can and does take robust action against providers that breach regulations and standards, from issuing warning notices and fines, through imposing conditions on a provider’s registration, to cancelling that registration altogether. During 2015-16, the CQC took 901 enforcement actions in adult social care, ranging from warning notices to prosecuting providers.

The CQC now has specialist inspection teams, which under the leadership of the chief inspector of adult social care include people who have personal experience of care. Inspections are required to take into account the views of service users and their families. Furthermore, the great majority of its adult social care inspections are now unannounced. The timing of inspections is based on assessment of provider risk, but their frequency in usual circumstances can be expected to be at least every 24 months.

The CQC’s fundamental standards that registered providers are required to meet include two very important registration requirements. The first is the duty of candour, which requires providers to be open with service users about all aspects of their care and to inform service users where their failures are in their care. The second is, as I have said, a fit and proper person requirement for directors that ensures that accountability for poor care can be traced all the way to the boardroom if necessary. These standards now give the CQC an effective power to prosecute providers in cases where a failure to meet standards results in avoidable harm or a significant risk of such harm.

[Jeremy Quin]

Will my hon. Friend or one of her ministerial colleagues kindly meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) specifically on that point in relation to Orchid View? We would be most grateful if that was possible.